The "Patriots for Europe" name is a joke. This anti-globalist group serves Russian imperial interests, defending the Kremlin while Russia wages war. By starving Ukraine of aid and fracturing European unity, they betray their own nations. Real patriots don't side with foreign autocrats

Honestly incredible stuff but this made me gasp: "For $100 million a year we can get clean oceans,” he said. This is less than the annual marketing budget of most major consumer goods companies that produce the plastic The Ocean Cleanup is pulling from the sea. techfixated.com/young-invent...

everyone, I have produced a report on how to remedy the decline of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. here it is: Executive Summary: Fund the Humanities and Social Sciences. Body: Fund the Humanities and Social Sciences a hell of a lot more. Please cite this as the Carroll report.

"Sometimes working across sources, disciplines, and periods is like being a semi-feral cat: you go adventuring and return home with treasure, only for your sometime hoomans to jump on chairs, shriek with horror, and reject your gift." An essay on historical method in @contingent-mag.bsky.social: 11/

A young man was murdered, the killer's family tried to cover it up, justice prevailed. This victim is brown, this killer is white. Politicians are silent. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Working class" in 2026 means a blue haired barista with they/them pronouns, a Asian immigrant nail technician, and an undocumented hotel cleaner. And we are going to keep having the same fights until we let the midcentury illustrator mirage of the white guy in plaid with the lunch pail go.

"The Ponzi Scheme is still working!"

A picture by one person, for one person: Las Meninas, 1656. It doesn't get any better than this. Some paintings by me on back wall (thank you Diego), but they are not stars of this show! Diego Velazquez, born OTD in 1599.

This is a really good thread, and I suspect it’s true. Long before AI, 25 yrs ago, I remember various people telling me they were going to write a quick romance novel “for the money” (an M&B advance then was around £5k). None of them could do it. Editors & readers didn’t respond to insincerity.

I have a theory about AI in publishing/writing, and readers. In 1984, Janice Radway wrote a book called Reading the Romance. She analysed groups of readers and buyers/consumers of commercial romance fiction, and discovered that, far from behaving like 'consumers' of what was rather rudely considered

Musk belongs in jail as do his minions behind schemes like this.

THEY ARE BASTARDS

listening to a bunch of old journalists/commentators talk about ai as though they’re very knowledgeable but all they’re doing is repeating industry talking points back and forth to one another, showing they really don’t have a clue

Rebecca Spang’s “Stuff and Money in the time of the French Revolution” is one of the best histories I’ve ever read of *anything*, & an especially valuable read for any writer trying to do world building, a brilliant guide to thinking about how stuff moves and works in another age. Strong recommend!

Gonna be honest - if after all that happened & continues to happen in the US, you still spend money to go to the US for anything but the most urgent of travel, this outcome is on you. Be grateful, it's far from the worst outcome. You should not travel to the US. www.bbc.com/news/article...

We should all pay more attention to the stuff that used to work really well and now doesn't.

Velvet Goldmine mixtape day 4: it’s time to talk about fashion. Bowie always knew the importance of fashion in defining himself, so of course VG needed to highlight it, too. Costume designer Sandy Powell knocked it out of the park in this film — and I devote a big chunk of a chapter to her work.

I don't know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about "AI" to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying "Well actually fire is used to make bread" when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses

If you don’t occasionally treat yourself to a day of exploring used bookstores, greenhouses, libraries, cafés, and bakeries, then what’s the point of anything really?

The instinct here will be to make this about THIS film and production. It’s really not that though. These are practices that develop out of the necessities created by larger economic forces. We have to collectively realize we can’t let people who worship wealth and power run the world.

Toni Morrison's "Jazz" as epic first sentence, first paragraph, and first page... Alt-text

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

ICYMI: The right-wing think tank that developed Trump's anti-DEI policies is now shopping model legislation designed to turn minor protest offenses into felonies under a novel theory it calls "CIVIL TERRORISM" 🫠 by @lhn.bsky.social

"NEWS MAN CREATE HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT BY SAYING JOURNALISM SHOULD BE GOOD. MANAGEMENT FEEL UNSAFE AROUND FACTS."

Local organisations are reviving self-sufficient food systems on Hawai‘i. On O‘ahu, non-profit Paepae o He‘eia has restored a traditional 600-year-old pond known as kuapa, removing invasive mangrove & rebuilding a wall so the kuapa can “give back to the sea.” buff.ly/YrPXXyT #ShareGoodNewsToo

UK publishing generated £7.4 billion in revenue last year. Compare that to: Premier League football: £6.6 billion Home entertainment: £5.6 billion UK film industry: 2.8 billion Now tell me again why authors don't deserve fair contracts and better pay.

And if you tolerate this, then your cheese forks will be next

SP leaves CBS after 37 years. “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. Good people were fired because they stood up for our audience. I pray for a day when when sanity, competence, and courage return.” www.theguardian.com/media/2026/j...

Who would you most like to go out for a drink with from Austen’s novels? I would like to get shit faced with Henry and Mary Crawford - there would be rum!

I saw Marjane Satrapi speak about her work at Smith College 19 years ago, and she said something I have thought about and taught ever since when I teach comics. “I draw what I can’t write and I write what I can’t draw.“

Europe removes 603 river barriers, setting a record for the fifth year running. Sweden led with 173 removals, while Iceland and North Macedonia joined the movement for the first time. Overall, Europe reconnected more than 3,740 km of rivers last year. buff.ly/ExMvzwL #ShareGoodNewsToo

The EHRC code of practice frames appearance based gendered assumptions i.e. assumptions around what are masculine and feminine traits at the centre of how you determine biological sex. It's not just that the code is segregationist and harmful to trans people. It is also hideously patriarchal.

Seems great until you remember the historians in question are Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook

A democratic willingness to cooperate in and with a science- and evidence-based regulatory environment, understood and enacted as vital to the common good, really IS the modernity we have all benefitted from. So, set it on fire, why don't we?

Another life-extending drug, this time for ovarian cancer.

The right love to spin a line about disaffected young men turning to them but there's absolutely no evidence to back it up. Quite the opposite. Most young Britons are liberal and left leaning. Yes some lads turn to manosphere influencers but they tend to be a small minority.

Honestly, good to finally see something like this in a mainstream outlet.

Scientists found yeast growing inside the guts of a frozen mummy for thousands of years. They used it to create a “very, very good” sourdough bread.

Pour un projet collectif, je cherche quelqu'un qui s'y connaisse un peu en Ancien Régime et/ou en jardins de l'époque moderne, et qui n'ait pas peur de la culture populaire. Connaîtriez-vous quelqu'un qui corresponde au profil svp ? @fannycomo.bsky.social, @notabenemovies.bsky.social, peut-être ?

He's a master of distracting us from crimes he's already committed by continuously committing new crimes. 5 months until the Midterms. #AccountabilityIsComing

Academic research also means spending a year writing 15,000+ words, then cutting it down to 8,000 (which is still 1,000 too many?) & publishing it just so you can have an article that you can cite in the research that you originally set out to do because that study didn't exist when you started.

Breaking News: Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French author whose graphic novel series “Persepolis” illuminated the struggles of Iranians during the Islamic Revolution, died at 56.

What if Ai is just pretending to be good at math and bad at doing dishes?

“Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.”

Really can't cope with the fact that Nottingham's now departed VC (now VC at Leeds - god help them) wasted £80 MILLION on a building it is now selling at a crushing loss (£14m), and is attempting to recoup some of that by sacking 100s of academics and decimating the institution. Absolutely criminal.

WANTED! Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics (Education) Education, Communication & Society King's College London Salary: £45,031 to £52,514 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRT413/l...

GOOD NEWS! A personalized mRNA vaccine, known as mRNA-4157, has shown promise in keeping melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, from returning. FIVE years later, NEARLY 70% of people in the vaccine group are CANCER-FREE. The vaccine also cut a person’s risk of the cancer metastasizing by NEARLY 60%.

Just a reminder: The Guardian entered a strategic partnership with OpenAI a little while back, so any time you see an article like this from them, you can immediately dismiss it as not credible journalism but just Sam Altman getting his money’s worth.

⚠️ This is why Reform’s Makerfield candidate, Robert Kenyon – surprise, surprise – allegedly has been both anti-abortion and toxically misogynistic on social media and this, crucially, is why Reform’s high command has said explicitly that it has no plans to censure or investigate him.